Tag Archives: Harry Truman

Outside of children who are big fans of those Planes movies, nowhere in American society is a single aircraft more iconic than Air Force One. When we fly our President around, we fly him in style, in a cutting-edge jet that can survive a direct blast from a nuclear bomb and is exclusively piloted by Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. Okay, neither of those things are true, but Air Force One is so mythic that a decent handful of you absolutely took us for our word there.

Air Force One is an American icon, both over and underappreciated at the same time. So we decided to take a moment to sit you down (you are sitting, right?) and tell you about the history of our President’s super expensive charter jet. And since we’re feeling generous, we’ll just let you know about every Air Force One plane that has ever existed, partly because we like to be as thorough as we can when it comes to discussing presidential aircraft, but mainly because we want as many excuses to post scenes from the movie Air Force One on our site.

Harry Truman was born in 1884. He served in World War I before going into politics, where he became the 33rd President of the United States. He held that office from 1945 to 1953, and he died at the age of 88 in 1972 in Kansas City, Missouri. Harry Randall Truman was born twelve years later in West Virginia, also served in World War I, and went on to live a pretty similar life to his presidential namesake, only instead of leading the free world, he lived in a cabin near Mount St. Helens with 16 cats and got buried under hundreds of feet of mountain debris after stubbornly refusing to leave his home during the nation’s deadliest volcano eruption. So, they’re pretty much the same dude.

And while there are hundreds of books about President Truman, there’s less literature on Harry Randall Truman, the man who became famous for a few months for saying, “Fuck you, volcano, come at me, bro,” until the volcano, you know. Came at him. Bro. So let’s take a moment to recognize a proud American who loved his home while failing to fully comprehend how volcanoes worked.

“Well, uh, that Biden fella is goofy looking and, uh, I believe we should make him the Vice President.”

~President Barack Obama

American Presidents run the gauntlet from “Ugly as sin” to “Your wife would bone him, let’s be honest” as far as physical attractiveness goes. But, to be President of the world’s greatest nation that only gets better when you remove the letter “e” from its name, you have to have a pretty large, healthy ego. So, for most Amrrican Presidents, there have been terrifying looking monster serving as their Vice-President. The more you think about it, the more sense it makes- much like a Bride giving her Maids of Honor ugly dresses to wear, the President wants the Vice-President to be there to make them look good. As much as her politics, rhetoric, and speeches were incredibly divisive and damaging to John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, what really doomed him from the start was that he decided to choose a running mate who makes you feel sort of funny when you see how she looks in a bikini with a gun. Meanwhile, an old man and a MILF were running against a young man and the puppet from Jeff Dunham’s stand up ventriloquist bits.

Young man with a puppet running mate win every time.

It’s American to be an ugly Vice-President, and honestly, there are so few instances of non-monster-like vice presidents that those that don’t look like a child of Mothra end up having an easy ticket into the White House. Plus, we’re pretty sure that the only reason Teddy Roosevelt was a Vice-President before becoming President was that he threatened to shoot McKinley if he wasn’t made VP before pointing at his nose and saying, “That’s called foreshadowing, asshole.”

So as the representatives of the pulse of this fine nation, AFFotD is primed to run down a list of the 10 ugliest American Vice-Presidents. Because even if they achieved more power than we ever can hope to come close to, we can take solace in the fact that no one remembers their names, and they were goofy looking. Like, really goofy looking.

[editor’s note- though it’s an easy target most people can recognize, we are not putting Dick Cheney on this list, mainly because our research staff found a picture from his High School Yearbook, and the majority of our female staffers said, “Holy shit, I’d actually bang that guy.”]

“You know the deal, people. Just post some random shit that happened today.”

~Johnny Roosevelt, AFFotD Editor-in-Chief

As we discussed in last week’s America Fun Fact of the Day, we really like to half-ass things on the weekend. Yeah, we’ve got our vodka swimming pool and condor egg omelets to worry about, but we do try to give ourselves a moment to make sure to let you know what has happened on each Sunday in America. So, without further ado, here is…